Tuesday, February 28, 2017

Sensible people should
give this schlocky action thriller a wide berth, but those with a taste for
entertainingly stupid films will find Zebra
Force a tasty morsel. Boasting cheap production values, a no-name cast, and
storytelling so sloppy that it’s never clear which character is supposed to be
the protagonist, the movie surmounts its shortcomings—in a manner of
speaking—by moving along at a brisk pace, flying from one goofy scene to the
next even though logic falls by the wayside within the first ten minutes. Plus,
it should be noted that some of the performances are adequate, with sorta-kinda
leading man Mike Lane giving an enjoyably cocksure turn as a Mafia enforcer. As
for the story, it’s a whopper: Under the supervision of a physically impaired
leader, a group of Vietnam vets robs several Mob-owned businesses, disguising
their white faces with sophisticated masks that make the gangsters believe the
robbers are all black men. And, to answer the obvious question, no, the
filmmakers don’t actually use sophisticated masks for the masquerade scenes.
Instead, black actors perform all the action until it’s time for the masks to
come off, at which point the white actors wear patently fake-looking masks for
a few seconds. Some low-budget movie illusions are so brazen that you almost
have to compliment the filmmakers for their hubris.

The general flow of the
story is that after the first robbery, an irate Mafia boss sends his top guy,
Carmine (Lane), to catch the thieves. Meanwhile, Lt. Claymore (Clay Tanner),
whose face is scarred and whose right arm is missing, both thanks to
battlefield injuries, masterminds his former Army unit’s get-rich-scheme.
Strangely, he’s portrayed as a chipper all-American type; Claymore refers to
his thugs as “a great bunch of guys,” and he makes them flush heroin seized
during a bust because, “We’re not in this to hurt society but to rid society of
some of its scum—and of course we reap the profit.” To imagine the full effect,
you should know that he delivers all his lines through an electrolarynx, so he
sounds like a robot. Especially because the storyline gets dumber and dumber as
the movie progresses, Zebra Force is
always thisclose to becoming genuinely terrible. Yet for the right viewers,
it’s a hoot. Inexplicably, the same team behind Zebra Force made a sequel, Code
Name: Zebra, which was released in 1987.

Monday, February 27, 2017

Few cinematic swan songs are as undignified as Flesh Feast, the final screen credit for
1940s movie siren Veronica Lake. Well into a physical decline thanks to
alcoholism and other difficulties, she hadn’t acted for several years before signing
on for this bargain-basement horror flick, and her marquee value had been
nonexistent for an even longer period of time. In this cheap, dull, and stupid picture,
she plays a scientist experimenting with techniques for reversing the aging
process. For reasons that are never clear, this mostly involves monitoring trays
filled with maggots. At the beginning of the movie, the scientist’s nefarious
employers kill a reporter who has gotten too close to the truth about the
secret experiments, so the reporter’s editor continues the dead man’s
investigation, abetted by a woman working undercover as the scientist’s
assistant. After the opening murder, virtually nothing happens for about 40
minutes, and then the closest thing the filmmakers can conjure to a thrill is a
lame vignette of a woman discovering a roomful of fake-looking corpses. Ineptly
made on every level, Flesh Feast is
distinguished by dialogue so arbitrary and sporadic that the soundtrack seems
as if it was ad-libbed by the smartasses at Mystery
Science Theater 3000. (One can’t blame Lake for seeming as if she’s reading
off cue cards in many scenes, because the movie’s inane chatter doesn’t merit
memorization.) To save you the unpleasantness of watching this whole movie,
here’s the one enjoyably ridiculous moment: In the final scene, Lake’s
character revives the body of Adolph Hitler (!) so she can toss maggots at his
face as a means of avenging her mother, who died in a concentration camp. With
that, Lake faded from the screen. She died three years after this film’s
release.

Sunday, February 26, 2017

Some movie
ideas are too good to be true, in the sense that it’s difficult to imagine a
fully satisfying story emerging from the idea. The made-for-TV mystery The President’s Plane Is Missing
exemplifies this all-too-common circumstance. The title alone, and the premise
it delivers, is tantalizing: What, exactly, would happen if Air Force One fell
off radar? With today’s 24/7 digital connectivity, the premise wouldn’t work,
because the whole world would know what happened almost instantly. In the early
’70s, there was a bit more leeway for stretching this scenario out to feature
length, and, indeed, the storyline—extrapolated from a novel by Robert J.
Serling—is fairly resourceful. Together with skillful direction by Daryl Duke
and the competent work of a cast mostly comprising veteran B-listers, the
crafty narrative makes The President’s
Plane Is Missing relatively interesting as a far-fetched potboiler. That it
ultimately devolves into a standard-issue conspiracy thriller is unsurprising,
because, really, that’s one of only a handful of directions the premise could
have led. To the filmmakers’ credit, they keep a few decent aces up their
collective sleeve, so those who seek out this disposable picture will find the
viewing experience pleasant enough.

The film’s main characters are Vice President
Kermit Madigan (Buddy Ebsen) and wire-service reporter Mark Jones (Peter
Graves). When Air Force One disappears during bad weather near Winslow,
Arizona, Madigan gets pulled into a constitutional crisis. He can’t assume the
presidency until the death of his boss is confirmed, and yet he’s obligated to
provide leadership while the president is missing. Naturally, there’s an
international incident brewing, specifically a standoff with China. Hawkish
advisor George Oldenburg (Rip Torn) advocates action, while doveish Secretary
of State Freeman Sharkey (Raymond Massey) counsels caution. Meanwhile, Mark and
his intrepid editor, Gunther Damon (Arthur Kennedy), sense that the available
facts don’t tell the whole story, so they push through high-security firewalls
to ferret out the truth. The picture’s balance of Oval Office intrigue and
field investigation keeps things lively, and the performances are never less
than professional. (Ebsen and Torn are the standouts, delivering, respectively,
plainspoken integrity and ruthless ambition.) Helping things along is an
energetic score by the prolific Gil Melle, featuring a Six Million Dollar Man-style combination of driving bongo beats and
militaristic snare patterns.

Saturday, February 25, 2017

Texan
playwright and screenwriter Horton Foote was involved with two of Robert
Duvall’s most important acting performances, his early breakthrough appearance
as mysterious recluse Boo Radley in To
Kill a Mockingbird (1962) and his Oscar-winning portrayal of faded country
singer Mac Sledge in Tender Mercies
(1983). Between those projects, the duo collaborated on Tomorrow, the screenplay for which Foote adapted from the William
Faulkner story of the same name. It’s a minor piece, rightfully overshadowed by
Duvall’s mainstream films of the same era, notably The Godfather (1971). Still, those who respect Duvall’s
extraordinary talent and Foote’s homespun poetry can find much to appreciate
here, because Tomorrow is a sincere
character study exploring the repercussions of a simple man’s clumsy attempt at
forming a human connection with a stranger.

Shot in black and white and mostly
set in and around a ramshackle sawmill that’s inactive during the off season,
the picture betrays its theatrical origins—Foote’s first adaptation of the
Faulker story was a play, which he expanded into the script for this project—and
some viewers will find the experience of watching Tomorrow claustrophobic and dull. The characters in this piece are
plain rural folks, and Duvall plays a man who mostly communicates through
physical actions, drawling his sparse lines in a guttural monotone whenever he
actually speaks. Yet while the accoutrements of the piece are specific, the
themes are universal.

Duvall plays Jackson Fentry, a man who has rarely
ventured beyond his father’s farm until he takes a job as the winter caretaker
for a sawmill located deep inside a thick forest. Claiming he doesn’t mind the
prospect of spending months by himself in the woods, he’s in fact painfully
lonely, so he welcomes the surprising arrival of Sarah Eubanks (Olga Bellin), a
young pregnant woman who stumbles upon the mill one day. Abandoned by her
husband and shunned by her parents, she’s even more alone in the world than
Jackson. He provides shelter, and over the weeks preceding the arrival of her
baby, they bond. Jackson proposes marriage, despite knowing that Sarah already
has a husband somewhere. Thereafter, fate intervenes in cruel ways.

The
intimate scenes work best, with Duvall’s repressed primitivism balancing
Bellin’s vulnerability and warmth—she comes across like a backwoods Blythe Danner.
Scenes involving outsiders are almost as effective, because Foote articulates
how Jackson tries to protect his newfound love,
only to get harsh reminders of his powerlessness. The wraparound bits framing
the story have less impact, and probably could have been discarded entirely,
especially since they add another layer of sadness to a story that’s already
downbeat. If only because Duvall is in nearly every scene, anchoring the film
with intensity and emotional truthfulness, Tomorrow
merits consideration as one of his key films, but it’s not for everyone.

Friday, February 24, 2017

The depressing thing about
Cheerleaders Beach Party is the glimmer
of wit visible beneath layers of dopey sex-comedy sleaze. Written by Chuck
Vincent, a pornographer who occasionally made R-rated fare, the picture is
tacky and tedious, rushing from one topless scene to the next and cramming in
as many naughty high jinks and sexual references as possible in between. Yet
the story makes sense, and it’s possible to imagine a version of the movie, with
some comedy punch-up and a little restraint, becoming palatable. The plot
involves a quartet of cheerleaders at Rambling University using sex and
subterfuge to keep the football coach at another school from poaching
Rambling’s top players with offers of better perks. (As the girls shout upon
formulating their scheme: “One-tw0-three-four, who do we put out for? Rambling
U, Rambling U—yay, team!”) Although the filmmakers don’t bother much with
characterization, they provide a lot of incidents, so the story moves along,
and every so often Vincent’s script features something resembling an
intelligent line or a reasonable plot complication. For instance, the girls
steal a van from Rambling’s coach, so in a running gag, he spends the whole
movie chasing after the girls while driving their tricked-out animal-print sedan.
Similarly, the climax involves the girls stealing medical samples of crabs and
releasing the pests into the jockstraps of players before an important
practice. These are bottom-feeding jokes, to be sure, but they reveal that a
bit more effort was put into this thing than necessary, just as drawing the
line at topless shots and partially clothed sex scenes reveals that the filmmakers
didn’t go as far down the grindhouse rabbit hole as they could have. That said,
this flick is still called Cheerleaders
Beach Party, and it’s still a dimwitted sexcapade driven by awful disco
music. Saying it could’ve been worse isn’t the same as saying it’s worth
anyone’s time.

Thursday, February 23, 2017

After having watched
countless low-budget ’70s movies about the brutalization of women, it’s hard to
know what to say about them anymore. These are vile movies catering to vile
appetites. To be clear, there’s a world of difference between something like
Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs (1971),
which explores horrific psychosexual terrain as a means of exploring difficult
questions about what makes people tick, and something like The Bloody Slaying of Sarah Ridelander. While far from the worst
movie of its type, not only because it’s made with a modicum of skill but also because the exploitation scenes aren’t stretched out to fetishistic length,
this picture is still so fundamentally grimy as to make the sensible viewer
feel sullied by the time the closing credits roll. Anyway, to get a sense of
what to expect, consider the flick’s various titles: In
addition to The Bloody Slaying of Sarah
Ridelander, the picture is known as Cycle Psycho and Savage
Abduction (hence the above poster). In fact, put those titles together, and
you get the basic plot: A bloody slaying leads to cycle psychos committing a
savage abduction. After a woman named Sarah Ridelander is murdered, her
husband, Dick Ridelander (Tom Drake), escapes police scrutiny because of an
airtight alibi. Yet he’s actually the guilty party, since he hired a maniac named
Harry (Joe Turkel) to kill his wife. (Harry violated the
corpse afterward.) Dick’s dreams of getting away with crime are derailed when
Harry blackmails him with audio recordings of Dick ordering the murder. The price for silence is a pair of pretty girls Harry can rape and murder for kicks,
so Dick enlists a group of bikers to kidnap would-be victims. Unpleasantness
ensues. For those who care about such things, this movie provides a good
showcase for offbeat character actor Turkel, familiar to cinema fans for
his work in movies ranging from Paths of
Glory (1957) to Blade Runner
(1982). His performance isn’t imaginative, but his characterization is sufficiently
loathsome and twitchy to create a few unnerving moments.

Wednesday, February 22, 2017

“Oh, dear
God,” the gunfighter exclaims. “They got everything in this country!” The
country in question is Spain, or at least this film’s funhouse-mirror version
of Spain, and the reason for the gunfighter’s exasperation is that even though
he’s an American from the Wild West, he’s encountered ghosts, gypsies, a
Shakespeare-spouting hunchback, marauding Moors, a bitchy princess, and
barbarian savages who may or may not be Vikings. Although it’s technically the
final entry in a four-film spaghetti-Western series starring Tony Anthony as
“The Stranger,” a knockoff of Clint Eastwood’s “Man with No Name” character, Get Mean—also known as Beat a Dead Horse, The Stranger Gets Mean, and Vengeance
of the Barbarians—is a deeply weird phantasmagoria disguised as an
action/adventure film.

Many have noted similarities between Get Mean and Army of Darkness (1992), the final theatrical entry in Sam Raimi’s
gonzo Evil Dead series, since both
pictures involve sarcastic Americans facing monsters in otherworldly realms.
Yet while Get Mean nearly matches Army of Darkness for imaginative
strangeness, it lacks the playful wit of Raimi’s movies, so the movie is dull
and flat when it should be exciting and whimsical. Anthony’s bland performance
is one weak area, but it’s not the only one. Jokes thud, villains seem petty
instead of nefarious, and scenes drag on way past the point when they cease
being interesting.

Thing get off to a lively start, because the Stranger gets
dragged by a horse through a desert—past some sort of metallic orb thngy—into a
ghost town, at which point the horse drops dead. Then the Stranger enters a
saloon, which suddenly has people, and encounters folks dressed in costumes
from various different historical periods. After a pointless bar brawl,
Princess Elizabeth (Diana Loris) hires the Stranger to escort her to Spain. Cut
to a map, revealing that the original location is in the Great Lakes (!), and a
line tracks the Stranger’s trip to Spain by horse, train, and steamship. Upon
reaching Europe, the Stranger gets roped into a war between the barbarians and
the Moors, accepting the challenge to perform a labors-of-Hercules mission. At one point during his odyssey, the Stranger discovers his
skin has turned black, just before he fights an angry bull. Other episodes
during the movie include an implied lesbian orgy, a torture dungeon, and a
shootout pitting the Stranger’s monstrous, multi-barreled hand cannon against
the hunchback’s rotating gun turret, which is equipped with full-sized cannons.

All of this sounds a lot more interesting than it is to watch, though Get Mean is somewhat lavishly produced. Director Ferdinando Baldi’s work is as unimpressive as Anthony’s, because
in addition to awkwardly shifting between comic and serious tonalities, the
filmmaker never quite maximizes the incredible visual potential of the material. Weird counts for something, but in the end, boring is boring. FYI, the preceding films in the series are A
Stranger in Town (1967), The Stranger
Returns (also 1967), and The Silent
Stranger (1968).

Tuesday, February 21, 2017

Viewed from either a
political or a technical perspective, Black
and White in Color­­—a coproduction from France and the Ivory Coast that
won its year’s Oscar for Best Foreign Film—is highly impressive. The
directorial debut of Jean-Jacques Annaud, Black
and White in Color is a slick production with flawless costuming,
photography, and production design, transporting viewers to West Africa circa
1915. Scenes inside dusty villages and military encampments are just as
visually persuasive as scenes taking place on battlefields that sprawl from
unforgiving plains to verdant jungles. Politically, the picture is just as
strong, delivering a simple antiwar message by way of a quasi-farcical
storyline about imperialist Europeans drawing unsuspecting Africans into
pointless armed conflict. Yet there’s sometimes a gulf between ambitions and
results. For all of its high-minded goals, Black
and White and Color has significant shortcomings, worst of which is a
tendency toward shallow characterizations. Annaud and his collaborators stuff
the film with so many characters that none can be developed fully, so it’s hard
to feel much emotional connection with the people onscreen, beyond normal
sympathy for individuals mired in tragic circumstances. Given this weakness, Black and White in Color works better as
a statement than as a story.

The gist of the piece is that two European forts are
situated in close proximity to each other, one occupied by French colonists and
one occupied by Germans colonists. When French geologist Hubert Fresnoy
(Jacques Spiesser) receives a care package containing months-old newspapers, he
and his Gallic colleagues learn their country is at war with Germany. Despite
the fact that the conflagration has been underway for some time with no impact
on their lives, some of the Frenchmen experience a surge of nationalism and
resolve to attack the German fort. They recruit natives as soldiers, offering
household trinkets as payment. Tragedy, predictably, ensues.

While some of the
satirical moments in Black and White and
Color are relatively subtle, too many are obvious. In one scene, for
instance, a French priest rides in a chair carried by several natives, who sing
in their own language about Europeans striking them as obese and odiferous.
Oblivious to the meaning of the lyrics, the priest declares, “Oh, how I love
this song!” Annaud films everything beautifully, whether he’s using long lenses
to capture documentary-style details during crowd scenes or staging a
trench-warfare scene in a rainy jungle ravine to amplify the physical
discomforts of combat situations. He also gets a few scenes just right, notably
the long sequence of a Frenchman leading a group over a tiny stream and
pretending it’s the Rhine. Of such delusions horrific jingoistic arrogance is
born. Nonetheless, Black and White in
Color grows repetitive soon after the “declaration of war,” and it was a
miscalculation to avoid making any of the Africans major characters. Annaud
conveys considerable anthropological curiosity with his shots of natives going
about everyday activities, but he inadvertently relegates Africans to the
status of second-class citizens, which is one of the very things he skewers his
European characters for doing.

Monday, February 20, 2017

According to William Lustig, CEO of cult-movie distributor Blue
Underground,the original negative for the racially charged exploitation flickFight for Your Lifefell victim to Hurricane Sandy while being stored in New Jersey, Seeing as how the movie
depicts a vile racist terrorizing a black pastor, it’s tempting to wonder if
the destruction of the print wasn’t so much an accident as a deliberate act of
God. After all, Fight for Your Life contains so much
cruel ignorance and senseless violence that one can imagine a vengeful deity smiting
the negative. In any event, the picture survives in digital form, so anyone who
wants to spend 80-siomething minutes watching a demented redneck and his accomplices gang-rape the pastor’s daughter, kill various innocent bystanders, and psychologically torture the clergyman can do so at their leisure. Fight for Your Life is relatively well
made for a film of its type, and the movie benefits from vigorous performances.
The picture is also of mild interest for genre-cinema fans because it contains
one of William Sanderson’s few starring roles. Known for his work in movies (Blade Runner), dramatic television (Deadwood), and sitcoms (Newhart), he’s among the industry’s most
versatile players, so he’s long since made artistic amends for appearing in
this, his first big-screen project. Plus, truth be told, he’s pretty good in Fight for Your Life, in the sense that
he’s utterly repugnant in every scene. Rarely will you be more eager for a
character to die.

The flick begins with Jessie Lee Kane (Sanderson)
and two accomplices escaping from a prison-transport vehicle. Hewing to the
familiar Desperate Hours formula, the
filmmakers place an unlikely refuge in Jessie Lee’s path, because he stumbles
across the home of African-American minister Ted Turner (Robert Judd). Jessie
Lee and his thugs kill people who approach the house and torment those inside,
beating the minister and committing the aforementioned sexual assault. The
Turners grow more defiant as the hours drag on, so at one point Ted’s wheelchair-bound grandmother unloads on the gun-toting Jessie Lee:
“I’ll tell you something, Mr. Poor White Trash—you ain’t nothing but what you
got in your hand! Your pappy shoulda thought of that before he stuck it in your
mammy!” Given the predictable plot, it’s only a matter of time before the
Turners get the better of their attackers. Meanwhile, police officers chasing the fugitives piece clues together—will they arrive in time to rescue the
Turners, or to prevent the Turners from exacting revenge? In lieu of imaginative plotting,
Fight for Your Life has a passable
degree of suspense and a nauseating amount of hatred. Not only does
Jessie Lee constantly spew the n-word, but he bombards his hostages with every
other emotional, physical, and verbal humiliation he can imagine.

Sunday, February 19, 2017

The significance
of this intimate telefilm derives as much from historical context as from the
events depicted onscreen, because That
Certain Summer is considered the first made-for-TV movie to present
homosexual characters as dignified protagonists. Seen today, the picture might
strike some people as inconsequential, for while That Certain Summer tells the touching story of a man forced to
tell his teenaged son about a profound lifestyle change, the picture lacks
dramatic fireworks. Everyone treats everyone else with respect, more or less;
no one goes for the jugular during moments of conflict; and the closest the
story gets to addressing political issues are a few dialogue exchanges
pertaining to the limited rights enjoyed by gay men in early-’70s America. Yet
because the narrative takes place in the progressive enclave of San Francisco, That Certain Summer isn’t about the
restrictions society places on people. Rather, it’s about the challenges people
face when asking others to change their perceptions. Not coincidentally, that’s
just what the film itself asked viewers to do by casting mainstream actors in
leading roles.

Hal Holbrook stars as Doug Salter, a contractor who divorced his
wife three years ago. Eventually, we learn that he told his ex-wife, Janet
(Hope Lange), about his bisexuality before they got married, and that she, like
so many women of her generation, presumed she could ease Doug into a permanent
heterosexual lifestyle by creating a loving and stable home. By the time their
son, Nick (Scott Jacoby), reached adolescence, Doug realized that he needed to
live his true identity as a gay man. In the years since the divorce, Doug built
a new life with a younger lover, Gary McClain (Martin Sheen), and they moved in
together. When the story begins, 14-year-old Nick arrives for an extended
summer visit with his father, unaware of how deeply Doug’s life has changed. In
fact, Nick—like so many children of divorce—holds onto the hope that his
parents will reunite. This summer, however, Doug has resolved to integrate the
two halves of his life by introducing Nick to Gary, even though Gary pretends
to live elsewhere so Nick isn’t confronted by too many shocking revelations at
once. Nonetheless, the sensitive youth puts the pieces together and runs away
from his father’s house, riding a trolley through the city while Doug and Gary
search for him. Inevitably, the story gravitates toward the moment when Doug
must tell the whole truth, despite the painful changes it will bring to his
relationship with Nick.

Writers Richard Levinson and William Link, best known
for their work on mystery shows (they created Columbo and co-created Murder,
She Wrote), display the same humanistic subtlety here they brought to other
made-for-TV movies, including The
Execution of Private Slovik (1974) and My
Sweet Charlie (1970). Both of those pictures were directed by versatile
craftsman Lamont Johnson, as was That
Certain Summer. Fine script and direction notwithstanding, this is primarily
an actor’s piece. Sheen channels the suppressed tension of a man trying not to
make a difficult situation worse until he briefly flashes anger during a
confrontation with his brother-in-law (Joe Don Baker, great in a cameo role).
Jacoby is good, too, investing the mostly one-note role of a confused kid with
palpable anguish.

Holbrook commands the film, playing gentle notes of
ambivalence and pride and regret as a man who masks his identity in
professional settings and desperately wants to be truthful in private settings.
As seen through the eyes of his character’s son, who has yet to form prejudices
but nonetheless receives demeaning signals from society, Doug is not a hero but
an everyman. The sheer ordinariness of his situation is what makes That Certain Summer so meaningful.

Saturday, February 18, 2017

Some bad
movies survive because they’re entertainingly inept, some endure because they
belong to popular genres, and others remain as documents of early work by
people who later became stars. And then there are movies like Nicole, also known as Crazed, which linger because of boobs.
Specifically, lowbrow distributor Troma’s video marketing for Nicole accentuates the fact that
supporting actress Catherine Bach, of The
Dukes of Hazzard fame, does a topless scene. Yet those who seek Nicole for an erotic charge are in for a
shock: Nicole is confusing, strange,
and unpleasant. Leslie Caron stars as Nicole, an insane rich bitch who builds a
surrogate family of sycophants. She toys with people, for instance compelling
Bach’s character to get a nose job and then secretly redecorating the young
woman’s apartment and replacing the young woman’s wardrobe. Nicole seems
vaguely interested in having a lesbian affair with Bach’s character, and yet
Nicole also seems to recruit a young male lover for the woman, and to recruit
an age-appropriate male lover for herself. Or maybe some of these people have a
threesome. You see, the problem with Nicole—okay,
one of the problems—is that
cowriter/director István Ventilla employs such a pretentious, splintered
storytelling style that it’s often difficult to understand what’s happening.
Moments get cut up and fragmented, audio is juxtaposed with picture in
seemingly random patterns, and behavior is never explained. Case in point: The
movie opens with an everyman (Ramon Bieri) discovering his wife in bed with
another man and then killing both of them. Cut to the same man working as
Nicole’s driver. How did they meet? Does she know what he did? Were the murders
investigated? Who knows? Who cares? As a leading character, Nicole is one of
those bizarre screenwriter inventions, a collection of perversions and tics
without any psychological glue, so Caron is seductive and urbane in one scene,
hysterical and violent in the next. As with all things Nicole, nothing about the performance makes sense, and very little
of it is interesting to watch.

Friday, February 17, 2017

Casual fans
who primarily know Peter Sellers from the Pink Panther movies may think his
penultimate film, Being There (1979),
represents Sellers’ only significant dramatic work, but of course that’s not
the case—interspersed between his many comedies are a handful of serious films,
though none captured the public’s attention the way Being There did. Among the actor’s lesser-known dramas is the UK
production The Optimists of Nine Elms,
released stateside with the abbreviated title The Optimists. Written and directed by Anthony Simmons, who based
the script on his own novel and reportedly envisioned the movie as a starring
vehicle for Buster Keaton, The Optimists of Nine Elms
tells the bittersweet story of an ex-vaudeville performer, now eking out a
sketchy living as a street performer. He befriends two latchkey kids,
broadening their horizons by showing them more of London than the working-class
slum where they live. He also teaches them life lessons of a sort, because he’s
so disheartened with people that he directs all of his affection toward a
scruffy pet: “You can forget all about humans,” he says. “You might as well
take poison. But a dog’ll always be your friend.”

As this remark suggests, The Optimists of Nine Elms is somewhat
ironically titled. Yet because the movie is driven by twee musical scoring,
features song-and-dance interludes, and ends on a sentimental note, it’s as if
Simmons envisioned the movie as uplifting. (There’s a lot more Chaplin than
Keaton in the film’s DNA.) Some will find the picture touching, but others will
regard The Optimists of Nine Elms as
dreary and dull.

Sam (Sellers) lives in a hovel cluttered with broken-down
showbiz paraphernalia. Every day, he treks to a busy street corner, puts on a
flashy costume, and sings old-timey songs while his trained dog bops around
with a cup for tips. Meanwhile, teenaged Liz (Donna Mullane) and her younger
brother, Mark (John Chaffey), live nearby, mostly ignored by their dad, who
works long hours, and their mom, who is preoccupied with housework. The kids
stumble across Sam one day and become fascinated, eventually joining him on his
daily outings. He’s kind some days and prickly on others, but he sees how badly
the kids want a dog of their own and tries to help. In one of the film’s
stranger scenes, he also takes the kids on a field trip to a pet cemetery. Fun!
Sellers is okay here, wearing a prosthetic nose as he wobbles between lively
and sullen; some viewers will find the spectacle of Sellers singing a
toe-tapping version of “This Old Man” more interesting than others. As for the
movie around him, it’s mostly quite gloomy, thanks to grimy locations and
Mullane’s perpetually sour facial expressions, although the music—credited to
Lionel Bart and the Beatles’ main man, George Martin—strives mightily to inject
happiness.

Thursday, February 16, 2017

Mildly enjoyable in that
familiar so-bad-it’s-good sort of way, schlocky supernatural thriller Asylum of Satan marked the directorial
debut of William Girdler, whose later output includes the fabulously silly
shockers Grizzly (1976) and The Manitou (1978). While this first
effort lacks the gloss of those subsequent pictures, Asylum of Satan has Girdler’s usual attributes of far-out
situations and zippy pacing. Put less gently, the movie is fast and stupid but
without the compensatory quality of slick production values. The shaky premise
goes something like this—after beautiful Lucina Martin (Carla Borelli) suffers
an emotional episode of some sort, her doctor inexplicably transfers her to an
asylum run by Dr. Jason Specter (Charles Kissinger). Populated by zonked-out
patients wearing white-hooded robes, the asylum is a staging ground for
Specter’s weird medical experiments and torture sessions. For reasons that defy
understanding, Specter occasionally kills patients in ridiculous ways, such as
releasing a vicious snake into a swimming pool so it can kill a patient in the
water, or trapping a woman in a room full of bugs. (The image of cheap-looking
plastic bugs “moving” across the patient’s body by way of stop-motion animation
is particularly laughable.) While Specter terrorizes Lucina, her boyfriend,
Chris Duncan (Nick Jolley), tracks her down, only to get rebuffed when Dr.
Specter somehow disguises his asylum as abandoned building. One idiotic scene
follows another until the climax, when Dr. Specter reveals his ultimate goal of
sacrificing Lucina to Lucifer, played by a woman wearing the least convincing
devil costume in movie history. Crap-cinema connoisseurs will relish Asylum of Satan, but mere mortals are
advised to steer clear. In fact, here’s the best part, just to save you the
trouble: During his search for Lucina, Chris learns from a cop that Dr. Specter
“was picked up several times for devil-worshipping.”

Wednesday, February 15, 2017

Telling the familiar story
of a young woman degraded by the humiliating compromises she makes while
pursuing Hollywood stardom, Black Starlet
should be a disposable exploitation flick. The budget is low, the cast is
unimpressive, and the exploitation quotient is high enough to become
bothersome, with gratuitous nudity periodically distracting from the story. Yet
Black Starlet meets and nearly
exceeds the very low expectations set by its subject matter and title. Star
Juanita Brown, who acted in a handful of ’70s drive-in flicks, grows into her
role, becoming stronger as her character falls from hopefulness to cynicism.
While certainly not a skillful performance, her work is committed enough to put
the movie across. Similarly, director Chris Munger and his collaborators put
sincere effort into making clichéd characters and scenes feel fresh. Everything
in Black Starlet is rote on the
conceptual level, from the sleazy agents and producers to the horrific scenes
of men demanding sexual favors in exchange for career opportunities, but the
way Munger lingers inside scenes—rather than speeding through them—allows a sense
of unease to take root.

Waking up one day next to a man she clearly regrets
sleeping with, Clara (Brown) steps to a window and looks out at Los Angeles,
then flashes back to events that led to her current situation. In her old life,
despite having taken years of acting classes, she was a millworker going
through a dull routine with a loser boyfriend prone to bar brawls. After one
too many humiliating Saturday nights, she left him and made her way to
Hollywood, where she got a job in a dry-cleaning shop while hustling for acting
work. Enter Brisco (Eric Mason), a scumbag agent willing to trade his services
for sex. He got Clara’s career started, but he also spread the word she was
willing to oblige, leading her into the beds of one bottom-feeding producer
after another. Ignoring good advice from the few kind souls she encountered in
Los Angeles, including business manager Ben (Rockne Tarkington), Clara became “Carla,”
a drugged-out, self-loathing, tempestuous diva.

What makes Black Starlet more or less palatable are the moments wedged between
exploitation-flick extremes. An early scene features Clara waiting on a street
corner for a bus. After several men stop their cars to solicit her, presuming a
black woman alone on the street must be a hooker, a motorcycle cop threatens to
arrest her, so Clara jumps into the next man’s car just to get away from the
cop. That man steals all of Clara’s money. Lesson learned. Later, in the
dry-cleaning shop, Clara endures hectoring from her boss, Sam (Al Lewis), a
cigar-chomping putz who refers to all his customers as “slobs” and obsessively
yells: “Don’t press above the crotch!” Individually, each of these scenes is
serviceable, but cumulatively, they give the vapid storyline a foundation in
human reality.

Tuesday, February 14, 2017

Something of a footnote to
Woodstock (1970), the classic
documentary immortalizing the most famous musical happening of the ’60s, Celebration at Big Sur was filmed just
weeks after the Woodstock Music and Arts Festival, but it wasn’t released
theatrically until almost two years later. Featuring several artists who also
performed at Woodstock—plus a notable performer who did not, Joni Mitchell—Celebration at Big Sur is choppy and
inconsistent, with interrupted songs, truncated versions of artists’ sets, and
lots of peripheral nonsense comprising the picture’s brisk 83-minute running
time. Despite a few musical highlights, the most interesting stretch of the
picture involves vituperative Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young member Stephen
Stills brawling with an obnoxious heckler. After the fight, Stills gets onstage
and says how grateful he is that “some guys were there to love me out of it,”
then adds, in words that seem like a parody of flower-child parlance, “We gotta
just let it be, because it all will be how it’s gonna.” Whatever it takes to
keep the vibe going, man. As for those musical highlights, Joan Baez delivers
her usual professional renderings of tunes including “Sir Galahad,” Mitchell
offers an ornate reading of “Woodstock,” CSNY churns through (part of) “Down by
the River,” and Mitchell teams with David Crosby, Graham Nash, John Sebastian,
and Stills for a zesty version of “Get Together.” Woodstock Lite, to be sure,
but pleasant enough.

Regarding this project’s backstory, from 1964 to 1971, the
Big Sur Folk Festival was held on the grounds of the mind-expanding Esalen
Institute, located on a scenic bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean. The
performances in Celebration at Big Sur
were filmed in 1969. Hollywood comedy writer Carl Gottleib produced the picture,
but he failed to provide a guiding aesthetic or theme—random vignettes capture
everything from a pointless conversation with a local cop to shots of Crosby
and Stills taking a nude sauna with other longhairs. One can’t help but get the
sense of West Coast progressives desperately trying to get in on the Yasgur’s
Farm action, even though the Big Sur event seems antiseptic and exclusive by
comparison to Woodstock. And by the time the filmmakers try to jazz up the
style of the picture with solarized double exposures while Mitchell adds a
yodeling freakout to the end of “Woodstock,” the grasping for cultural
relevance becomes almost painfully desperate. Celebration at Big Sur captures a moment, but other films—including
not just Woodstock but also Monterey Pop (1968)—capture almost
exactly the same moment much more effectively.

Monday, February 13, 2017

Time for
another so-bad-it’s-good wonderment. The misguided horror picture Haunted begins in the Old West, when
corrupt palefaces sentence a Native American woman to death on charges of
witchcraft. A century later, a weird family resides in a ghost town.
Leading the family is loutish stepfather Andrew (Aldo Ray). He’s married to
Michelle (Virginia Mayo), a blind widower who spends her time playing the same
song over and over again on an organ—that is, whenever she’s not vividly
describing memories of the first time she had sex. Even though she’s only in
her 50s, she’s portrayed as suffering from dementia, a source of great sadness
for her two young-adult sons. Meanwhile, the phone company inexplicably installs
a phone booth in the cemetery occupying the center of the ghost town. Andrew gets calls on this phone that transform him into a psychopath. Eventually, a
mysterious redhead named Jennifer (Anne Michelle) wanders into town, and she
may or may not be the reincarnation of the Native American witch from the
prologue. Strange and unpleasant things happen, but life, more or less, goes
on—Michelle’s sons proceed with plans to put her in an asylum, and her oldest
son enjoys a sudden romance with Jennifer. Sort of. When he falters during a
makeout session, she asks if he’s gay and he says he’s not sure. Virtually
nothing in Haunted makes sense, but
the movie is so catastrophically bad that it’s compelling to watch. For instance,
the opening-credits scene features the Native American woman riding topless
through the desert while Billy Vera over-emphatically sings the ridiculous song
“Indian Woman” on the soundtrack (“She rides the waves of the curse she lives!
Her hate keeps her going! She’ll never forgive!”). Throughout the movie,
writer-director Michael A. DeGaetano’s dialogue is awkward, stilted, and weird,
so the chatter regularly slips into self-parody. Upon Jennifer’s arrival,
Michelle remarks, “We haven’t had any visitors since yesterday—it’s been
years!” Even though the film’s production values are borderline adequate,
nearly every scene has a massive flaw in continuity, dramaturgy, logic, or
storytelling, if not all of the above. The music is especially egregious, with
upbeat numbers during gruesome scenes and laughably rotten lyrics decorating original
songs. (Brace yourself for the picture’s noxious love theme, “A Distant Time.”)
Unsurprisingly, Haunted is a washout
in terms of horror, because it’s too difficult to follow what’s happening to
actually find any of the onscreen events frightening.

Sunday, February 12, 2017

Investigators with offbeat
gimmicks were a staple of mystery fiction long before television came along,
but by the ’70s, Hollywood had perfected the art of repackaging the same old
whodunit storylines by featuring unusual protagonists. Columbo hid his wit
behind a façade of simple-mindedness, McCloud was a cowpoke in the big city,
Ironside was confined to a wheelchair, Kolchak solved paranormal mysteries, and
so on. Yet some of these gimmicks were so threadbare as to be almost laughable.
The most notable attribute of private investigator Frank Cannon, who fought
crime during five seasons spanning 1971 to 1976 and returned for a 1980
telefilm, is girth. Yep, he’s big. Corpulent, fat, morbidly obese, rotund—take
your pick. The character has other traits, but his size is a point of
conversation from his first appearance forward. Thanks to smart scripting and a
winning performance by star William Conrad, Cannon spends the enjoyable pilot
movie that preceded his weekly series coming across as clever and dogged and
resourceful. He even gets into brawls and foot chases. Characters remark on his
weight, as does Cannon himself, but mostly he gets down to the tricky business
of solving a murder and untangling a conspiracy. Particularly because this
pilot has such a fine supporting cast of versatile character actors, it’s
unsurprising the movie connected well enough with audiences to trigger a
series. But, still, the sheer laziness of the whole enterprise—this one’s
different, see, because he’s fat!
There’s a reason they used to call TV a vast wasteland.

One day, ex-cop Cannon
gets a letter from Diana Langston (Vera Miles), the widow of an old friend.
Traveling to the small desert town where she runs a motel, Cannon investigates
the man’s death and gets stonewalled by local cops including Lt. Redfield (J.D.
Cannon) and Deputy Magruder (Earl Holliman). Turns out the whole small town is
under the thumb of crime boss Virgil Holley (Murray Hamilton), and things get
even more complicated once Cannon discovers that Lt. Redfield’s sexy wife,
Christie (Lynda Day George), has dangerous romantic ties outside her marriage.
Despite several attempts on his life as well as threats of incarceration,
Cannon helps Diana learn how and why her husband died, cleaning up Diana’s town
in the process. Written by series creator Edward Hume, the Cannon pilot has the same qualities as other series from Quinn
Martin Productions (The Fugitive, The Streets of San Francisco, etc.),
notably crisp characterizations and strong visual interest, so even when the
story gets garbled—a common trap for mystery shows—the action, locations, and
performances command attention. (Also featured in the cast are Norman Alden,
John Fiedler, Lawrence Pressman, Barry Sullivan, and Keenan Wynn.) Is the story
about anything? No. And excepting a few twists, is the story genuinely fresh or
surprising? No again. But detective shows are comfort food, and in that regard,
Cannon is a hearty meal, suitable for
the appetite of its protagonist.